James Russell Lowell

“ And Lowell liked to think that he had in his make-up something of the element which in a Lochiel you would call second-sight. Sometimes he alludes to that in his letters; he has only to shut his eyes, he says, and he can see all the people whom he has known, whom he wants to see, and carry on his conversation with them. I have already said that when I painfully worked through the poems of James Russell, our James Russell’s great-grandfather, rendering that homage to the shade of that poet which no one else has rendered for a hundred years, I had to remind myself that he, alas! ”

“ We generally speak of a man's descent. In the case of James Russell Lowell's ancestry it was rather an ascent through eight generations. Percival Lowle's son, John Lowell, was a worthy cooper in old Newbury; his great-grandson was a shoemaker, his great-great-grandson was the Rev. John Lowell of Newburyport, the father of the Hon. John Lowell, who is regarded as the author of the clause in the Massachusetts Constitution abolishing slavery. ”

“ James Russell Lowell (1819- ) , the foremost of American critics and of living American poets is, like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded Longfellow as Professor of Modern Languages in Harvard College. Of late years he has held important diplomatic posts, like Everett, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, having been United States Minister to Spain, and, under two administrations, to the Court of St. James. Lowell is not so spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow. ”

“ Of this character are his “Massachusetts to Virginia” and “Astræa at the Capitol.” In other poems he unites tenderness and grace with much simplicity of language. All of his descriptive poems, but especially “Snow-Bound,” his masterpiece, are strikingly national. James Russell Lowell (born 1819) is one of the most versatile poets of this period, and has won high reputation as a prose writer by several volumes of essays, chiefly on literary topics. His serious poems are earnest and philanthropic in tone, elevated in sentiment, and of high artistic merit. ”

“ Nay, shameless women set to hire Their bodies, heedless of hell-fire;
It is after reading a passage like this in a book written in the Thirteenth Century that one feels the full truth of that expression of the greatest of American critics, James Russell Lowell, which so often comes back to mind with regard to the works of this century, that to read a classic is like reading a commentary on the morning paper. ”

“ James lacks what is called knowledge of the world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity. He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening the ardor of his fancy. ”

“ Few Americans in our time have apparently had a more satisfying career than that of James Russell Lowell, a successful author as a young man, then a successful editor, a teacher whom his students appreciated very much, and in later life the subject of many honors and such honors as provided him with splendid opportunities for the exhibition of his special genius. He would seem to be the last who should suffer from depression. ”

“ Watts-Dunton, however, insisted that with all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of his loyalty to his own country. There never was a stauncher American than James Russell Lowell. Let one unjust word be said about America, and he was a changed man. Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due mainly to Lowell. Indeed, he expressed this conviction in one of his finest sonnets. It appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ after Lowell’s death, and it has been frequently reprinted in the United States. ”

“ From that time he stood as the typical independent in politics. In April 1892 he delivered at Baltimore his eleventh annual address as president of the National Civil Service Reform League, and in May he appeared for the last time in public, to repeat in New York an admirable address on James Russell Lowell, which he had first delivered in Brooklyn on the 22nd of the preceding February, the anniversary of Lowell’s birth. On the 31st of the following August he died. He was a man of consistent virtue, whose face and figure corresponded with the traits and stature of his soul. ”

“ A POEM IN WHICH A DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN POET AND DIPLOMAT EXPRESSED HIS FEAR OF OLD WORLD INFLUENCES.
With the single exception of John Hay, no English-speaking poet has been so distinguished as a student of the social and political phases of national life as was James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) . It is doubtful whether the United States ever produced a poet who was more truly national. His earlier verses were characterized by quaint Yankee humor, and many were virile pictures of New England life. ”

“ Lowell evidently knew its turns and corners and bosks and deserts well. Ragged, barefoot boys were playing cricket in their improvised way with the most primitive of tools, such as they had constructed from the spoils of the streets. No policeman bade them leave the place, no sign intimated that they were to keep off the grass; an admirable loafers’ paradise for the real children of the public, such as there is not in our tidy Common in Boston, and such as I never saw in the Central Park of New York. It was pleasant to see how thoroughly at home Lowell was there. ”

“ They seem the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look like architectural spectres, and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice," or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose. ”

“ Harriet Brackett, daughter of Keith and Mary Whipple [Traill] Spence, was born 26 July, 1783; she married the Rev. Charles Lowell, 2 October, 1806, and died 30 March, 1850.
CHILDREN OF JAMES RUSSELL AND MARIA [WHITE] LOWELL.
1. Blanche, born 31 December, 1845; died 19 March, 1847.
2. Mabel, born 9 September, 1847. She married, 2 April, 1872, Edward Burnett, of Southborough, and died at Elmwood, 30 December, 1898. Their children are:
i. James Russell Lowell Burnett, now James Burnett Lowell, his name having been changed at the request of his grandfather. ”

“ He delivered the public address in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University; he gave a course of lectures on the Old English Dramatists before the Lowell Institute; he collected a volume of his poems; he wrote and spoke on public affairs; and, the year before his death, revised, rearranged, and carefully edited a definitive series of his writings in ten volumes. He died at Elmwood, August 12, 1891. Since his death three small volumes have been added to his collected writings, and Mr. Norton has published Letters of James Russell Lowell, in two volumes. ”

“ Who gets a hair’s-breadth on by showing
That Something Else set all agoing?
Farther and farther back we push
From Moses and his burning bush;
Cry, “Art Thou there?” Above, below,
All nature mutters yes and no!
’Tis the old answer: we’re agreed
Being from Being must proceed,
Life be Life’s source. I might as well
Obey the meeting-house’s bell,
And listen while Old Hundred pours
Forth through the summer-opened doors,
From old and young. I hear it yet,
Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet,{187}
While the gray minister, with face
Radiant, let loose his noble bass. ”

“ Great farms and gardens were attached to them, and some sign of their roomy ease still remains. The estates fell into the hands of various persons after the war, and in process of time Longfellow came to occupy Craigie House. Elmwood at that time was the property of the Reverend Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston, and when Longfellow thus became his neighbor, James Russell Lowell was a junior in Harvard College. ”

“ In this way Lowell spent three or four terms at Cambridge, and then he spent as much time in regular attendance in the office of his father’s friend and parishioner, the Hon. Charles Greeley Loring, for many years a leader at the Boston bar. It is not difficult to trace the results of Lowell’s faithful work in these three years in his after writing. Any person makes a great mistake who infers from the abandon of some of his literary fun that he did not know how to work, steadily and faithfully, better than the worst Philistine who was ever born. ”

“ Jaalam, November 4, 1847.
'To the Editor of the Courier:
"Respected Sir,—Calling at the post-office this morning, our worthy and efficient postmaster offered for my perusal a paragraph in [Pg 405] the Boston Morning Post of the 3d instant, wherein certain effusions of the pastoral muse are attributed to the pen of Mr. James Russell Lowell. For aught I know or can affirm to the contrary, this Mr. Lowell may be a very deserving person and a youth of parts (though I have seen verses of his which I could never rightly understand) ”

“ We cannot say that our own as yet suffices us, but I believe that he who stands a hundred years hence where I am standing now, conscious that he speaks to the most powerful and prosperous community ever devised or developed by man, will speak of our literature with the assurance of one who beholds what we hope for and aspire after become a reality and a possession forever.”
Lowell sailed for England 18 May, 1889, and spent five months there at his customary haunts in London and in Whitby, revisiting his old friends and preferring the intimate associations to the social functions. ”

“ As a comparative stranger might draw from Lowell one of his most delightful letters, if some question he sent him happened to catch him at a favorable moment, when he needed only an occasion for the letter that was on tap, so these students, one or more, offered an easy audience, and Lowell, rarely out of the mood for talk, would spin his gossamer or weave his strong fabric for them as well as for any one else, without paying very close heed to them personally. ”

“ When, in the spring of 1845, the Lowells returned to Cambridge from Philadelphia, where they had spent the first four months of their married life, it was to share the family home of Elmwood for the next six years. Lowell’s father retired in the summer of 1845 from active charge of the West Parish in Boston, but retained his interest in various societies which gave him partial occupation, leaving him leisure for the indulgence of his taste for reading and for the pleasures of gardening and small farming. ”

“ LOWELL, CHARLES RUSSELL (1835–1864) , American soldier, was born on the 2nd of January 1835 in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, Anna Cabot Jackson Lowell (1819–1874) , a daughter of Patrick Tracy Jackson, married Charles Russell Lowell, a brother of James Russell Lowell; she wrote verse and books on education. Her son graduated at Harvard in 1854, worked in an iron mill in Trenton, New Jersey, for a few months in 1855, spent two years abroad, and in 1858–1860 was local treasurer of the Burlington & Missouri river railroad. ”

“ In the old manor-house of Elmwood in Cambridge, close to what is now mount Auburn Cemetery, our finest representative man of letters, James Russell Lowell, was born and bred. His father and his grandfather before him lived here, the former a Unitarian clergyman of the old school, well read, earnest, somewhat narrow, but an essentially religious man. His mother was a gifted woman, and a woman of high culture for those days. She read foreign languages, was a musician, and a woman of high breeding, and she stamped her own individuality strongly upon at least three of her children. ”

“ Lowell’s father, mother, and sister Rebecca went to Europe early in the summer of 1837. They were gone three years, and during that time the young collegian found in his brother Charles his nearest friend and adviser; his house indeed was the student’s home when he was not in college, and his wife was the best of sisters to him. Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell was herself a woman of fine culture and of unwonted intellectual power. At a later period than this she opened a school for girls, which is looked upon by many now in mature life with warm gratitude. ”

“ The pressure upon Lowell, which his college work and his editorship brought, did, during these four years, stop, somewhat, his spontaneity. He wrote but few poems, and his letters show the effort he needed to make to force some gayety. “I am that man among mortals,” he wrote to Miss Norton, “whose friends must forgive him the most treasons against friendship,—silence, staying away, dulness when he writes or comes—and I know not what else,—yet I do believe that my heart holds fire as long as another, and that I neither grow cool nor forget sooner than most. ”

“ With another classmate Lowell was on the most intimate terms—Dr. George Bailey Loring, since distinguished as the head of the Department of Agriculture in Washington. Loring studied medicine at the same time when Lowell went to the Law School; but Lowell frequently visited Loring’s beautiful home in Andover, and from schooldays forward the similarity of their tastes brought them into almost constant correspondence in matters of literature. Dr. Loring was the son of the minister of Andover, and that gentleman and Lowell’s father had been friends. For us now, this has proved singularly fortunate ”